Brighter OLED TVs still burn in just as fast, RTings long-term test finds

RTings has wrapped up a long-term burn-in study comparing OLED TVs made between 2020 and 2023 against a 2017 LG model — and the newer panels are not meaningfully better at resisting burn-in despite years of supposed improvements.

The culprit is brightness. The average 2023 OLED tested 28% brighter than the 2017 model in a 10% SDR window test, and 52% brighter in a sustained full-screen SDR test. That extra luminance appears to cancel out whatever burn-in resistance gains the newer panels actually made. All TVs were run at maximum SDR brightness and subjected to thousands of hours of continuous CNN playback — a worst-case scenario where the channel's static lower-third banner stayed on screen the entire time. At the 10,500-hour checkpoint, that banner had visibly burned into the newer displays just as it had on the older one.

OLED burn-in has been a known concern since the technology went mainstream, and manufacturers have steadily added mitigation features — pixel shifting, screen savers, automatic brightness limiters — to combat it. The RTings data suggests those measures are real, but the race toward ever-higher peak brightness is eating the gains. It's a classic engineering trade-off: the same properties that make modern OLEDs look stunning in a bright showroom are working against long-term panel health under static content.

There's a practical upside buried in the results, though. Because newer panels are so much brighter to begin with, turning the brightness down a couple of notches still leaves you with more usable light output than the 2017 model ever offered — and should reduce cumulative panel stress. RTings notes that for most mixed-content viewers, burn-in is still unlikely to be a real-world problem; the 18,000-hour full test run is equivalent to watching nothing but CNN for five hours a day for ten years straight. If you're worried, lowering brightness and varying content remains the sensible advice, and many manufacturers still offer extended warranties covering burn-in.